Chess

CHESS

CHESS. Records from the court of Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries represent the first well-documented history of the game of chess. The game entered Spain in the eighth century and had spread across western Europe by the year 1000. Benjamin Franklin advanced chess in the United States with his essay "The Morals of Chess" (1786), in which he stressed the importance of "fore-sight," "circumspection," "caution," and "perseverance." Popular interest in chess was also advanced by the publication of such books as Chess Made Easy, published in Philadelphia in 1802, and The Elements of Chess, published in Boston in 1805. By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States had produced its first unofficial national chess champion, Paul Morphy, who took Europe by storm

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in 1858, defeating grandmasters in London and Paris, but his challenge of British champion Howard Staunton was rebuffed. America's next world-championship aspirant was Harry Nelson Pillsbury, a brilliant player with prodigious powers of recall who died at age thirty-four.

In 1924, at a meeting in Paris, representatives from fifteen countries organized the Fédération Internationale des Eá checs (or FIDE) to oversee tournaments, championships, and rule changes. The United States Chess Federation (USCF) was founded in 1939 as the governing organization for chess in America.

Since 1948, Russian-born players have held every world championship, with the exception of the brief reign (1972–1975) of American grandmaster Bobby Fischer, a child prodigy who captured the U.S. chess championship in 1958 at the age of fourteen. In 1972 Fischer defeated Soviet great Boris Spassky for the world championship in Reykjavík, Iceland, in the most publicized chess match in history. The irascible Fischer refused to defend his title in 1975, because of disagreements over arrangements for the match, and went into reclusive exile. He reappeared in the former Yugoslavia in 1992 and defeated Spassky, but no one took the match seriously.

Quick chess, which limited a game to twenty-five minutes per player, appeared in the mid-1980s and grew in popularity in the 1990s, after Fischer patented a chess clock for speed games in 1988. Computer chess began earlier, when, in 1948, Claude Shannon of Bell Telephone Laboratories delivered a paper stating that a chess-playing program could have applications for strategic military decisions. Richard Greenblatt, an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a computer program in 1967 that drew one game and lost four games in a USCF tournament. Researchers from Northwestern University created a program that won the first American computer championship in 1970. Deep Thought, a program developed at Carnegie Mellon University and sponsored by International Business Machines, defeated grandmaster Bent Larsen in 1988. Deep Thought's successor, Deep Blue, played world champion Gary Kasparov in Philadelphia in February 1996. Kasparov won three games and drew two of the remaining games to win the match, 4–2. At a rematch in New York City in May 1997, after the match was tied at one win, one loss, and three draws, the computer program won the final game. Computer programs of the 1960s could "think" only two moves ahead, but Deep Blue could calculate as many as 50 billion positions in three minutes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fischer, Bobby. My Sixty Memorable Games. Reissue, London: Batsford, 1995.

Hooper, David, and Kenneth Whyld. The Oxford Companion to Chess. 2d ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Levy, David, and Monty New born. How Computers Play Chess. New York: Computer Science Press, 1991.

Louise B. Ketz

David P. McDaniel

See also Toys and Games .